Education Legislation Bill

We now move to debate on Part 2 and schedules 1 and 2.

In speaking to Part 2, I want to refer to Subpart 1, “Amendments to Ngarimu VC and 28th (Maori) Battalion Memorial Scholarship Fund Act 1945”. I stand in support of the new provisions within this subpart of the bill, and it is a shame that this is part of a wider bill that we do not support. All due credit to the Minister, Hekia Parata; this is a very important part of New Zealand’s history, the contribution by the 28th (Māori) Battalion and by the famous Ngati Porou soldier Ngārimu. Those contributions ought to be reflected properly within the Act, and the changes in the Act need to be acknowledged. Nō reira, e tika ana kia tū ake au kia tuku mihi atu ki ngā āhuatanga katoa kei roto i tēnei wāhanga o te pire nei. E mihi ake au ki te whānau o Ngārimu i roto i tēnei āhuatanga.

[So, it is appropriate that I rise to acknowledge all aspects in this part of this bill. And, similarly, to acknowledge the Ngārimu family in these circumstances.]

This provides an enormous legacy, and rightfully so. It is important that the whole Committee actually acknowledges these changes, although they are mostly technical—changing the language and correcting the way that things are expressed. It is about a scholarship, so I understand why it is in the Education Legislation Bill. I look forward to when this subpart of the bill is separated out into its own bill, and we will be able to support that moving forward. I think it is also important that the other parts of the legislation—and I am sure my colleague Jenny Salesa will speak to those ones that affect the Pasifika people.

Ā, nō reira, kāore e roa tēnei tū, otirā, e tika ana kia tū ake ki te tuku mihi atu ki ēnei āhuatanga i te tuatahi; nō reira, e Te Whare, tēnā tātou, kia ora!

[Therefore, this speech is not a long one but at the same time it is apt that I rise to acknowledge these aspects in the first place; so accolades to us, the House, and thank you.]

Kia ora, Mr Chair, thank you very much. I just want to make a few contributions around Subpart 2 of Part 2, “Amendments to Pacific Islands Polynesian Education Foundation Act 1972”, particularly with regard to the interpretation of “Pacific person”. I want to acknowledge and thank the Education and Science Committee members for supporting the inclusion of the Kiribati and Tuvaluan community as part of the descriptors of Pasifika persons living in New Zealand. As a member of a community with the largest Kiribati and Tuvaluan community based in New Zealand, which is in Warkworth, it is personally satisfying to have this community—a relatively new community to New Zealand; over a decade now—recognised in this way.

I do not want to take any more of the Committee’s time, but I do want to acknowledge that it required the support of the officials and it required the support of the majority of the select committee to make sure that the Kiribati community and the Tuvaluan community of New Zealand are acknowledged inside this legislation. Kia ora.

The question is—

💬 Chris Hipkins: I am sorry, Mr Chair.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Are you calling? Chris Hipkins.

Yes, I am, Mr Chair. My apologies—my colleague Tracey Martin sat down a little bit sooner than I was anticipating, and I do want to make a few brief contributions on Part 2 of this bill, because these are all provisions that the Labour Party members will be supporting.

I want to, however, just canvass a couple of things. One is that Part 2 of this bill amends a number of separate Acts, and I am concerned that in the way the bill is drafted, these provisions have not received the scrutiny that they adequately deserve. The traditional convention in the House is that when an omnibus bill, which amends a number of different Acts, is prepared, the different Acts are different parts of the bill so that they can actually be scrutinised appropriately by Parliament. What has happened in the case of this bill is that we have had one part that amends the Education Act and then a sort of also-ran part that basically deals with a whole lot of other legislation relating to education administration, even if it is in no way connected to Part 1.

The Standing Orders Committee of Parliament specifically ruled out this practice in 1995, when it required that the Government cease to introduce what I believe were called—I cannot remember the exact title—something along the lines of “legislation amendment bills”, which basically allowed the Government to insert amendments to any different legislation it wanted into a single bill and push it through the House. The Standing Orders Committee was quite clear that there had to be a clear unifying policy purpose to connect all of the amendments that were put into the bill. The Government has adopted as its policy purpose for this bill the updating and modernising of education legislation. Well, that is not actually really a policy purpose, and, therefore, all of the amendments contained in this part are not in any way connected and so should not be drafted in the bill in the way that they are.

I want to put on record my concern that this bill has got all the way through the House to this point without there being adequate scrutiny of the way it has been drafted, because it certainly does not comply with the spirit and intent of the Standing Orders Committee’s report in 1995, and it is certainly outside of the usual conventions of the House in the way that bills should be prepared.

However, having said all that, I want to turn to some of the specific content of the bill and just make a few very brief comments. It did strike me when I was reading the bill that some of these changes are long overdue and perhaps reflect how far we have come, both as a House and as a country, in that some of the somewhat antiquated terminology is now being replaced. If we look at the Ngarimu VC and 28th (Maori) Battalion Memorial Scholarship Fund Act and turn to the second clause in regard to this, clause 37, we are replacing the phrase “the Maoris” with “Māori”. I know that this might seem a small thing, but you can just imagine what was being said when they were debating this in the first place. The attitude would have been vastly different from the one that we have today.

I actually think it is quite a positive sign that we are updating this, because the vast majority of members in the House would not have been Māori members when this was first debated and, dare I say it, there probably was some semblance of attitude that the Māori were the people over there who needed to be contained and dealt with. I think it is fantastic that Parliament has actually embraced the Māori heritage of New Zealand and is now modernising the legislation that is relevant in this area. I want to fully support this particular provision, which I think is a much more appropriate way of talking about Māori New Zealanders than the previous definition in the Act.

There are other provisions. There is a provision that relates to the Minister of Education being able to delegate their power around supplementary agreements with integrated schools. I would normally get into that in much greater detail, but the very next bill that Parliament will be debating around education actually changes all of the legislative provisions around integrated schools, in the sense that they are being brought into to the Education Act as a whole, so there will be adequate and ample time to canvass issues around integrated schools when we come to debate that next bill that will be coming up.

The Labour Party certainly supports all of the amendments in Part 2. They are updating legislation that has become out of date. We are certainly looking forward—oh, actually, I have just spotted some that we probably do not agree with, which are the amendments to the State Sector Act. But, by and large, the rest of the amendments, with the exception of the amendments to the State Sector Act, are ones that the Labour Party will be supporting.

I want to confine my remarks to Part 2, clause 53, with regard to the change in the defined term from “Polynesian” to “Pacific person”. I raise this because I understand that there have been changes to the Pacific Islands Polynesian Education Foundation Act 1972. I note that in the original Act it refers to Polynesian, and the definition of “Polynesian” in the original Act “means a member of the Polynesian race living in New Zealand who is both—(a) a native of any island of the Pacific Ocean”. This begs the question whether it is just the Polynesian we include here, because there is Melanesia and Micronesia. Now that we have moved away from using the word “Polynesia”, and we are using the word “Pacific”, others may ask about the Solomon Islands—are they Pacific? I was not part of the select committee so I do not know what the thinking was—whether it was supposed to be encompassing, with the new definition including “Pacific” rather than referring just to the Polynesian sector only. That is what I wanted to ask there.

The other thing is this: in the original Act it also makes reference to a fund. There was a fund, a foundation, established, which would be under the Minister of Education, with the Minister having responsibility for the management or the governance of that particular funding. I am asking whether we know how much money is in that fund, because the purpose of that funding was to help Pacific communities and to be able to provide support for their educational aspirations. I am not quite sure whether any member of the public is aware that that fund exists and that it sits with the Ministry of Education under the Minister of Education’s jurisdiction. That begs the question, then: is that fund going to be available for the Polynesian grouping, or is it now going to include the wider definition of “Pacific”, which includes only the other islands that are now part of the new definition—Cook Islands, Fiji, Niue, Samoa, Tokelau, Tonga, and now Tuvalu and Kiribati? I say that because as small as these other populations are, they do exist and they do live in Aotearoa New Zealand.

With the growing Pacific population expected to reach significant numbers in the next 10 or 20 years, I think it is a concern for those of us who want to see the potential of the Pacific community improve significantly in the years to come, because of the dependency of this nation on that Pacific—or brown—workforce. To save me the trouble of having to write out a written question, it might be useful if the Minister was able to provide some answers to that.

I also note that in the subsequent clauses—let me refer you to the constitution of the board, in clause 60—it makes reference there that if a member appointed to the board is absent from any meeting, the member may authorise any other person to attend the meeting in the member’s place. I am not sure what the purpose of that is, whether it was to maintain a quorum, but under normal circumstances if you are the member appointed and you cannot attend, you table an apology. I do not know what the purpose is of an appointed member now being able to authorise another person to represent them in the likelihood that they will be absent from a particular meeting. What was the reason for including that?

I am generally asking these questions because the submissions on this took place at a time when I was not a member of this select committee, so I have not had the privilege of being part of that and hearing the ministry’s explanation as to the amendments to this Act, but I would be really interested to know. I dare say I have heard of some times where a Solomon Islander would say “Am I not a Pacific person?”, or a Vanuatu person would say “Am I not a Pacific person?”.

Now that I have had a chance to refresh my memory, I do want to address the issues around the State Sector Act and the changes being made to the State Sector Act, and, in particular, the new powers that are being given to the State Services Commissioner. I want to just run through those because these were debated at the Education and Science Committee, and there was some divided opinion amongst the submitters and amongst the teacher unions and the principals who came in and presented to the committee.

The new power in new subsection (1A) of section 75, inserted by clause 83, says that the State Services Commissioner “may, in addition to the actual conditions declared under subsection (1), approve further conditions of employment for an individual employee, or any class of employees”—that has been struck out—“who is employed in the education service under a collective agreement if the conditions are—(a) mutually agreed … ; and (b) not inconsistent with the conditions of the collective employment agreement.”

What the submitters presented to the select committee was support for the idea that the commissioner should be able to approve, in individual circumstances, additional conditions of employment, but they should not be able to impose those on a whole class of employees as the bill was originally structured. There was a variety of submissions that were received and they were by no means unanimous. The New Zealand Post Primary Teachers’ Association supported the amendments. NZEI Te Riu Roa and a couple of individual submitters supported parts of the amendments but not parts of others. But the main issue of concern was around the idea that the State Services Commissioner could approve new conditions of employment for a whole class of employees. What that would do, effectively, is undo the collective bargaining provisions, because these are provisions that would be in addition to any collective employment agreement that is being entered into, and that really does undermine the whole good-faith bargaining concept—that bargaining can take place and the commissioner can then go outside the bargaining to approve additional terms and conditions that would undermine that.

The change that has been made to allow the commissioner the ability to approve additional terms and conditions for individuals, which has now been made by striking out the words “or any class of employees,” basically, I think, meets that test. So having earlier said that we were going to oppose this, I can say that we will support it on the basis of the select committee’s very sensible change, because I think that we have actually addressed the concerns that were being raised by the submitters.

I move, That the question be now put.

Motion agreed to.

Part 2 agreed to.

Schedules 1 and 2 agreed to.

Clauses 1 and 2